Time to Sweat The Small Stuff
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With a few months left in the year, I thought it would be nice to tackle smaller goals. Focusing on big wins usually gives you gives you great returns, but every so often it's time to take of financial housekeeping. I've spendt this weekend looking for ways we can optimize our finances, whether it's by consolidating accounts, switching providers, or cutting back on expenses.
What's on Our Money List Right Now?
Here are few things on our list of money goals that we want to finish by the end of the year: 
- Switch the allocation of future contributions on the current 401(k).
- Call up an old employer to get 401(k) information for a rollover.
- Rollover the above mentioned account.
- Place a sell ad on Craigslist for one of our cars.
- Check out cell phone providers to see if we can find a better deal on our cell phone plan.
- Look at a local credit union for business accounts (and possibly for our individual accounts).
- Check my husband's credit report.
- Update our joint budget.
- Clean the house and get rid of unnecessary furniture.
Just looking at the list is motivating. Seeing as we have 14 weeks to accomplish these goals, I'm feeling pretty good. Our contract is almost up with Sprint and I wanted to check to see if there is a tremendous deal elsewhere. We've been happy with their services so a switch would have to mean significant savings. (Of course we'll check with current customers of a potential provider before making a jump.)
Those with an attention to detail, no doubt noticed that we haven't sold our car yet. It's actually worse – we haven't put it up for sale yet. Not officially 🙁 I'll explain more in a future post, but suffice it to say, I'm not happy about our laziness.
As far as cleaning the house goes this is one the money to do list for 2 reasons:
- I don't want to buy more stuff for our place until I know it's a need. We're trying to simplify our home and lives.
- Making some pocket change with our stuff would be great for paying down the student loan.
Thoughts on Smaller Money Goals
How about you? What are some small goals you'd like to finish before this year is over?
Photo Credits: pen and pad & notepad
Hopefully those goals don’t take too long. When I wanted to roll over my old 401k to an IRa I called vanguard and they 3 way called my 401k provider and took care of everything, it was awesome!
The credit report should be a quick win too. I pulled mine earlier this year while compiling a step by step guide for my blog and it still didn’t take very long.
Good luck!
I moved some funds with Vanguard also and they did the heavy lifting, so I didn’t have to contact my old fund family I was ditching. Super easy and awesome customer service.
I hope they won’t take long either. I think the biggest will be getting the house organized and done. The plan is to focus on one room at a time.
We make yearly goals and divide up such tasks so I won’t be overwhelmed, but of course things come up and some months get loaded. Sometimes we institute a goal work night, where we both hunker down and knock those goals out together.
That’s something we may do if we get behind on the list. Now that we have a semi-routine that our baby girl is used to maybe we can get these things done sooner rather than later.
Jinx! Something about this time of year is for list making — you’ll end the year great when you accomplish all those!
I think just noticing how quickly the new year is coming up is kind of a kick to the pants to getting things done. (At least for me!)
We want to check into different internet-based services to replace our cable TV, cancel said cable, pull credit reports, and sell a few things on e-Bay. Should be do-able!
Great list Christa; please let me know you guys do.